'Buffet Froid' aka 'Cold Cuts'  (1979) - Bertrand Blier.

In my admittedly blithe and unwaveringly Blier- biased opinion, that most audaciously gifted Gallic genre iconoclast, Bertrand Blier, remains the perversely playful ‘L'Enfant terrible’ of French new wave cinema, and his deliciously immoral, teasingly ruthless, abyssal-dark comedy thriller, 'Buffet Froid' aka 'Cold Cuts' is a ferociously frosty treat, a preternaturally perverse revenger's tragedy wherein no fell dead goes wickedly unpunished! 

The impish, perfectly blackened, pitilessly sardonic script is a mordantly mirthsome triumph of taciturn terror tactics, and the immaculate, strangely skewed performances by our determinedly devilish trio of ingenuous, knife-fetishizing psychopath, Alphonse Tram (Gerard Depardieu), the demonically deadpan police inspector Morvandieu (Bernard Blier), and an especially weaselling, paranoid portrayal of the terrifically timorous strangler ‘L’assassin’ (Jean Carmet) makes for a rare epicurean feast for the senses! There is something palpably feline, unwholesomely capricious about the unpredictably off-beat narrative, the predatory glee with which the director toys with film noir conventions, capriciously twisting the chiaroscuro crime tropes into an alternate, far more abstract realm! Like Chabrol on ayahuasca, Hitchcock on HRT, or, perhaps, merely the inimitable, Bertrand Blier on fabulously feral form, 'Buffet Froid' is a sympathetically surrealistic film treasure, and I truly envy anyone who has yet to experience the ambivalently murderous charms therein! Dig in!

 

 

'Don't worry, it's quite safe, the knife on its own is quite harmless...'

'I've had guns pointed at me in far worse places, toots!'

'I vant to be alone!'

Bedroom quartets rule hard, dude! 

'Baroque rocks ma' cock!'